Faster Internet Access

A while back we opted for faster Internet access, 150mbits/s. I’ve been dragging my feet a bit fighting off bronchitis or something but I felt clear-headed today and TLW was off at a party, so… I got an IP address for Beast direct from the ISP and modified the dhcp configuration and the old 100mbits/s router to be a wireless switch and set up a firewall to properly handle all the connections. Surprisingly, it all works, except one client failed to come back with ifdown eth0;ifup eth0 to get the new network settings. A BlackBerry somewhere in the house is responding wirelessly. Odroid-C2 is happier than ever.

Speed is nice, a bit over 150 mbits/s on the download but only ~10mbits/s on the upload. The old router was giving us about 50 mbits/s downloads. I do have a gigabit/s connection to the modem at last, so we are finally getting what we pay for…

The biggest problem of this whole project was converting Beast from a LAN-only server hiding behind another firewall to putting Beast on the Internet with its own firewall tuned up. The firewall software depends on certain features of Linux that I did not have compiled-in for my stripped down version. I think that took about 5 runs before I got it right. No doubt using a stock kernel would have been faster. I have no ports dangling out there and the only glitch with the firewall seems to be some undesirable logging activity. I will look into that another day. Tonight I surf!

UPDATE – I was logging “martians“. It’s amazing how much activity on the web is trying to get in the front door. Dropping them without logging now.

UPDATE – Lo, and behold! We had a power-failure right in the middle of a party. Visitors were able to access the WiFi just fine as usual but the system did not recover gracefully. Our ISP is really slow to start DHCP from the modem once power returned. I fiddle for a few minutes before we recovered an Internet connection. I even reset the modem again. Otherwise, all went well.

About Robert Pogson

I am a retired teacher in Canada. I taught in the subject areas where I have worked for almost forty years: maths, physics, chemistry and computers. I love hunting, fishing, picking berries and mushrooms, too.

The inventor of Self Balancing Budgets, is set to boost the economy with a carbon tax that will make everything more expensive, make everyone poorer, ship billions overseas and make energy so expensive, that tens of thousands of Canadian jobs will depart to low cost energy in America.

Just in the last six weeks, another handful of companies are leaving Ontario for the U.S. because of operating costs, before getting hammered with carbon taxes. It’s now a race to the bottom. Bravo as growth in 2016 was tepid at best and the IMF has Canada near the bottom until 2019.

Nope. Don’t need it for the party tomorrow. Kitchen. I cleaned the granite counter-tops and glass stove-top to perfection as well as dried the glass and table-ware to remove water-spots. I also fetched and carried various items to/from car and storage. It’s all good.

The garage is definitely on the “to do” list. I’m thinking to buy an electric car sooner or later and some butchering equipment. The finished alternator might use that space too although TLW wants me to set up a storage shed outside the house. As well there are things stored in the garage now that we’ve not touched in years… so it may as well go somewhere else. 2017 will be fun as long as I can ignore the implosion of USA under Trump’s era of corruption unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.

Chuckle. I thought the story might be different Christmas Eve with people partying early and opening presents and staying off the web: 174.7 mbits/s download speed works for me. Beast III as the new router is good for 74.7 mbits/s or more of that as the old router maxed out at 100 mbits/s. Life is good. Except for Trump, 2017 should be a really great year. Merry Christmas everyone!

TLW has been cleaning all day and getting me to do some of the heavy spots. I look forward to tomorrow when all I have to do is roast a turkey and eat the thing. With a Colorado low coming I might have to do that alone if family can’t travel on the day… It’s OK. My stomach is one of the few parts of my body that still works well.

dougman spewed, “Would you accept that an electric car sale stating that it goes 150 kilometers per hour, when in fact it slows to ONLY 31 kilometers per hour after a few moments in time? I surely hope not.”

Hey! I’m getting great service from Shaw. Why should I complain?

dougman also wrote about Canada’s target of 50 mb/s for broadband Internet. I think that’s just fine. I did see that but haven’t formed any particular comment about it. I think it’s a rather modest goal for urban situation, where most Canadians live. I think it should be gigabit/s there. For rural/remote situations 50 mb/s is absolutely wonderful but for urbanites it will be long obsolete by the time the target-date arrives. I guess it’s better than nothing to have any sort of target but I think it needs to be more in line with technical/economic possibilites and not just some average for the whole place. Many rural communities are 50 miles or more from the nearest community so running a long cable without subscribers along the way is very expensive and satellite has lags… In the cities we could easily have fibre to every postal code and run copper from there. That is doable and it’s probably affordable both in terms of total price and desirability in the view of the consumer. In my community, for instance, we are about to run sewer lines everywhere. When the ground is open, it would be very easy to spool in some fibre, killing two birds with one stone. More rural areas have bigger problems so wireless might be the way to go with small dishes at each drop and a tower serving them within ~10-30 miles. That would work everywhere except the arctic/boreal forest in this neighbourhood. The hard part is getting out to the lighthouse on the point or some mine or cabin 200 miles from anywhere. Satellite or balloon might be the best solution for the sparse places.

Instead of spewing pacifist socialist feminist ideas, perhaps you should focus on just technology in relation to computers, eh?

Coincidentally, did you file your grievance with Shaw yet? If not, why not? They are basically ripping your Scrooge butt off. You should jump on the phone and jump and scream like the millennials did that voted for Hillary on election night.

Would you accept that an electric car sale stating that it goes 150 kilometers per hour, when in fact it slows to ONLY 31 kilometers per hour after a few moments in time? I surely hope not.

Deaf Spy wrote, “inclination to accept anything that is cheap, even when it is worse than officially advertised”.

Or not. I have very inexpensive rifles, Remington 788s, that are prized for shooting better than the far more expensive 700 models. See also Wikipedia: Remington Model 788. For half the price folks could buy a rifle that shot twice as accurately as the standard Remington rifle. I’ve fired my own and many others and none of them shot as poorly as the best 700s I’ve encountered. Even TLW can shoot sub-MOA groups with such rifles. I reload my own ammunition too because I can fire a shot for about half the cost of retail while getting superior accuracy.

I care far more about performance than appearance while others spend two or three times as much for appearance. I have had some unfortunate encounters with Chinese manufacture but the prices were so low that it’s not a problem. I do read specs and I’ve had many very good transactions. I’ve been building PCs and servers from parts for ~20 years and have rarely been disappointed. I haven’t bought an Intel CPU since 1992, I think. I’ve bought a lot of Realtek NICs and loved every one of them. Nvidia, not so much. Billions of people are buying ARM and love it. I love what works.

Most venerable Wizard, I will dare express the opinion that Dougie’s little outburst was dictated by Robert’s inclination to accept anything that is cheap, even when it is worse than officially advertised. Be it tractors, batteries, arm-based good-for-nothing devices, internet connection…

Btw, I prefer not to tease this prominent community here with internet connections… 😉

You should try Australia! Thanks to Murdoch’s bribes to the LNP, Internet speeds are measured in kB/s not MB/s. This is resulting in the continuing loss of Australian businesses dependent on reasonable communications speeds to the rest of the world.

“My test was late at night when lots are playing online games and such. Now on Sunday AM, I’m getting peaks of ~18MB/s and overall, “2016-12-18 08:55:35 (14.0 MB/s) – ‘/dev/null’ saved [659554304/659554304]”.”

Overall your Internet speed sucks! Shaw is throttling your connection and if I was you I would complain!!

I was quite happy with the old service. It’s TLW who loves “deals”, “packages” and “special” pricing. She arranged the 150mbits/s service all on her own. I just enabled using the last 50mbits/s yesterday. Our previous service was ~50mbits/s ISTR. I replaced our old router having a 100mbits/s NIC with Beast having all gigabit/s NICs. TLW is not into porn. I suspect her heaviest bandwidth usages are YouTube, FaceBook and Gmail. She does think faster is always better. Who am I to tell her otherwise? The biggest problem for me was rebuilding a kernel with all the right NetFilter components. Previously I built a minimal kernel with few NetFilter configs. There’s probably documentation somewhere listing the requirements with my firewall but I didn’t look (here). I just ran the firewall and found what didn’t work. Anyway, rebuilding the kernel for just a tiny change is very fast. I didn’t need to rebuild everything, just the added NetFilter component.

dougman wrote, “Perhaps you should contact Shaw and tell them they are liars.”

Well, my peak speed was ~16MB/s which was OK. The fact that it is cable and my system is multi-user/multitasking also has an effect. No one can guarantee me any particular speed when other processes along the way can impact my share of the system.

My test was late at night when lots are playing online games and such. Now on Sunday AM, I’m getting peaks of ~18MB/s and overall, “2016-12-18 08:55:35 (14.0 MB/s) – ‘/dev/null’ saved [659554304/659554304]”.

So, I’m reasonably happy with Shaw. This is a significant improvement over the previous service and router. My LAN is now all gigabit/s except for WiFi and the TVs. I suppose one day I will add 802.11n but for now g is what we use. I don’t have any clients that use n.

LOL, your cable is supposedly 3X faster than mine, but I can download the very same ISO, using the very same methodology and obtain it faster than you. See you start out at ~15MB/s then your speed slows to 3.87MB/s. Perhaps you should contact Shaw and tell them they are liars. If you pay for a particular speed, you should be able to use that speed without being throttled.

My Mission

My observations and opinions about IT are based on 40 years of use in science and technology and lately, in education. I like IT that is fast, cost-effective and reliable. I do not care whether my solution is the same as yours. I like to think for myself.

My first use of GNU/Linux in 2001 was so remarkably better than what I had been using, I feel it is important work to share GNU/Linux with the world. I have been blessed by working in schools where students and school systems have benefited by good, modular software easily installed in most systems.

I have shown GNU/Linux to thousands of students and hundreds of teachers over the years and will continue in some way doing that until I die in spite of the opposition.